The present invention relates to a client-server electronic filing system, a document filing method and storage medium for use in the filing system, and more particularly to a client-server electronic filing system having a check-in check-out facility for document management, a document management method and storage medium for use in the filing system.
The client-server electronic filing system allows two or more clients to share documents and has a feature that, when a change is made to a document by a client, the resulting document can be immediately referenced by the other clients. For this reason, this type of filing system has an exclusive control function among two or more clients to ensure the consistency of information two or more clients share. In addition, the system has such a security function as to specify clients who are allowed to make references and changes to documents or document folders.
With this type of filing system, however, the following problem arises when two or more clients update the same document. That is, a client A retrieves a document for updating purpose and updates it on the client side. Before the result of the updating is reflected in the server, another client B may also reference the same document for updating purpose. At this point, the updating by the client A is not yet reflected in the document that the client B is referencing. After that, the result of updating by the client A will be reflected in the original document in the server. At a still later time, the result of updating by the client B will be reflected in the document in the server.
As a result, in the server the document updated by the client A will be overwritten by the document updated by the client B, so that the updating by the client A is not reflected in the document in the server, but only the updating by the client B is reflected.
Thus, the problem with the conventional system is that changes made by clients are not reflected correctly.
Conventionally there is also a method to allow only one client to update a document through the control of update rights. This method imposes operation restrictions which are too stringent to solve the above-described problem and is not suitable for the essential technical concept of document sharing by two or more clients.